Transcultural Humour in Goodness Gracious Me and East
is East

Panel Statement Presented at the GNEL/ASNEL
Conference, May 2002 in Erfurt (Germany)

Vera
Alexander (Cologne)

In this paper I examine two humorous
depictions of the situation of Asian immigrants in Britain in the popular
media: the first is the award-winning BBC series Goodness Gracious Me which was first broadcast in 1998, and the
other is the Anglo-Pakistani Ayub Khan-Din's play East is East (1996) which was made into a film, directed by Damien
O'Donnell in 1999.

Goodness
Gracious Me consists of a series of sketches and
songs which inverse stereotypes about immigrants of South Asian origin in
Britain and their encounters with white Britons, fellow immigrants and
non-diasporic Indians.

East is
East describes the struggles of a large
Anglo-Pakistani family in 1970s Salford. Ruled by a strict Pakistani father who
tries to redeem himself in the eyes of his community by proving that his
mixed-race children conform to Pakistani culture, the various members of the
family rebel against patriarchal rule, and try to balance the incongruities
which their lives are made up of.

Humour fulfils an important ice breaking
function in presenting new ideas, even, as is the case with immigrant problems,
potentially unpleasant ones in a palatable way: laughter is a good start. While
it seems hard to get away from Horace's formula that the poet, or in our case,
the comedian or playwright aims to "delight and instruct", this
double function becomes hard to uphold as soon as the topic of humour is
transferred into academic discourse. If comedy can both delight and instruct,
then doesn't it threaten a discourse which has a tendency to downplay the
delightful bit? Humour challenges scholarship because many of its elements
elude analysis: to explain a joke is tantamount to killing it off.

Humorous devices employed in both
productions comprise exaggeration, stereotyping, defamiliarisation and parody.
They expose hypocrisy and xenophobia as the key sources of cross-cultural
misunderstandings, and by poking fun at Asian immigrants and white British
natives in equal measure, they give a comfortable notion that tolerant
intercultural interaction could be a very simple affair if only members of all
groups did not practise their ridiculous strategies of othering, exclusion and
self-deception and were willing to try and adopt a changed perspective.

In order to establish a grounds for
comparison between these two productions, I would like to focus on the way in
which they deal with the topic of arranged marriage. Goodness Gracious Me contains a song-sketch in which two women sing
about an Indian man. One of these women is his innocent Indian bride to be, and
the other is his frustrated secret English lover. Their duet starts out as a
duel, in which the comedy evolves through the juxtaposition of radically
different perspectives on the topic of arranged marriage. Eventually, the
singers realise that they are both in a no-win situation and the original
rivalry dissolves in a gesture towards female bonding – the absent male is
declared a lost cause.

This fairly harmonious solution only works
in a short episode. In East is East,
the topic of arranged marriage marks a cataclysmic moment as the tension of the
bride-viewing, a play within the play set in shrill surreal colours, brings to
the boil all suppressed conflicts and reveals the artificiality of the act of
Pakistaniness put on for the sake of maintaining peace.

Both scenes in different ways defamiliarise
the topic of arranged marriage by means of comic exposure which criticises a
specifically Asian cultural institution.

Reviewers have expressed surprise at the
success of both productions, and an unnamed reviewer of Goodness Gracious Me phrases the puzzle as follows: "Is the
show's success a sign that our society has changed? Or is it just that it is
very funny?" To my mind, the hen-and-egg situation implied by these
questions – does laughter depend on a certain degree of knowledge or
competence? – can be resolved in favour of the fun-side.

The two productions are evidence that
postcolonial humour in the popular media is not an issue which only concerns a
handful of scholars who regularly deal with cross-cultural encounters and
postcolonial discourse. Humour is the main ingredient which has obviously made
the subject of immigrants appealing to audiences who may not have had a
previous interest in the topic.

Postcolonial discourse works on many
different levels and addresses complex problems of race, gender,
transculturality etc., all of which elude closure. So does humour. It seems to
me that postcolonial discourse is the right field at which to redefine the
contradictory notion of "taking humour seriously" as it combines many
disciplines and has already helped to break down conceptal boundaries. As the
two productions discussed above indicate, humour often operates experimentally,
by doing the unexpected and achieving results before they can be explained.